Resilient Sustainable Future for Iowa City
What is Resilient Sustainable Future for Iowa City (RSFIC)?
As a society, we’ve got a big, overwhelming problem: our culture is fundamentally unsustainable. We all know it. But we’re sort of paralyzed – none of us know exactly what needs to be done, or in what order, and sometimes it feels like there’s nothing an individual can do to make a difference. And in the meantime we have bills to pay and jobs to keep.
RSFIC is a private foundation in Iowa City with a mission to build long-term, systemic resilience in Iowa City. We are finding ways that we can collectively shift our behavior and beliefs that are fun, healthy, and realistic in today’s brittle and unsustainable society.
We’re not talking about saving the environment – we’re talking about growing solidarity and relocalizing power so that Iowa City can be resilient to the wild changes that we know are headed our way.
Our strategy has four parts:
Neighborhood Strength
Our society is becoming more and more individualized, which is leaving us isolated, lonely, unhealthy, and dependent on expensive corporate services we can’t afford in a sustainable way. Transitioning to resilience culture depends on us growing solidarity and de-growing individualism. To help this transition along, we’ve helped neighbors around Iowa City start over 50 projects with each other, practicing solidarity in fun, low-stakes ways. We believe the cumulative impact of catalyzing hundreds or thousands of small collaborative projects within the city will have a far-reaching impact.
In the Lucas Farms neighborhood we helped folks who wanted to get their block together for a “cookie swap” – on one level, just sharing home-made cookies with each other, but on a deeper level, building relationships, demonstrating trust, and feeding each other!
In the South District, we helped folks who wanted to get a regular soccer game together. All they needed was some help painting lines on the field, but on a deeper level they’re building community, physical strength, and since the game was free, making the neighborhood a more affordable place to live.
We’ve made short films of a sample of projects we’ve helped with – you can see them here.
Today, this program revolves around giving grants of our staff time, our event spaces, and up to $500 of financial support. In the long-term we want to provide the support needed for larger-scale neighborhood resources like tool- and vehicle-shares, cooperatively owned shops, locally-owned real estate, and other cooperative endeavors. Find out more here.
Fun and Normal Civic Engagement (FANCE)
Our participation rates in community-focused organizations has been dropping, and we’ve been putting too much responsibility on politicians running for office making impossible promises. Resilience culture will mean relocalizing power for all members of our community. We’re helping people understand the trends of power and change locally, within Iowa City, and have brought hundreds of people together to start discussing their needs, their challenges, and their visions for the future.
At one event we brought candidates for City Council together with 75 residents from all over the city to enjoy a meal and live music together before discussing the issues at stake. At other events we’ve brought folks together in groups of four or five to educate and inspire each other.
This program revolves around Fun And Normal Civic Engagement events like potlucks, parties, and tea times. If you’re interested in learning more, sign up for our FANCE newsletter here. We want to find more & more ways to invite everyone in Iowa City to live into their own agency.
We also know that many, many other people around Iowa City are doing a lot of hard work to improve our town, and might be able to use our help but do not need our leadership. So, we created an event space that folks can use for free for social events, organizing meetings, support groups, or anything else where a nice space would help. We opened the space in May of 2024, and so far five other organizations have made use of the space. If you need a nice spot to get together, for any reason that aligns with growing solidarity, degrowing individualism, relocalizing power, or consuming less, contact our Events Creator, Denise, at [email protected]!
Cultural Narrative
Resilience culture will mean changing some of our high-level beliefs and values. For example, many leaders believe our economy needs to grow to succeed, despite the reality that Earth is finite and we cannot grow forever. For another example, we value “efficiency” so much that we don’t even realize when we are prioritizing cost-cutting and time-saving over skill-building and community-strengthening – we shop at Walmart and Amazon despite the reality that these companies decrease the number of jobs available in Iowa City, increase our cost of living, and lower our tax revenue. We need to rearrange some of our values if we want to find a resilient balance.
We believe storytelling has the power to shift the beliefs, norms, and behavior that make up our culture. RSFIC is working with FilmScene, our local non-profit cinema, to show stories of appealing and sustainable examples of resilience culture in the form of short films. The shorts play before every feature-length film, so tens of thousands of viewers are exposed to the values of working together, consuming less, and relocalizing power. They see these values at play in stories that really happened in their actual neighborhood, and we hope that increases their effectiveness.
We also share stories of neighborhood solidarity directly to neighbors with postcards mailed only to the specific neighborhood the story happened in. We advertise on buses, local radio stations, and other local media. If you’re interested in this approach, sign up for our newsletter here. We want to find more and more ways to invite everyone in Iowa City to share their own stories of resilience culture!
Long-term Bets
Learn more about these other organizations making long-term bets
All of us can make small changes to move farther into resilience culture. We can recycle, we can compost, and we can do cookie swaps or collaborate on child care (learn more about our projects program here!).
At RSFIC we know that the challenges coming down the road will also require some bigger solutions. The way we build housing today is fundamentally unsustainable and is setting us up for eventual failure. The way we burden our public schools with so many social responsibilities is unfair and unsustainable. The way we farm is destroying our long-term resources. And there aren’t many small steps you can take as an individual – most folks can’t incrementally try a different way of organizing the entire educational system!
So, at RSFIC, we’re also taking some long-term bets that might take a decade or more to play out. As a well-funded private foundation, RSFIC can invest in real estate and equipment outside of the reach of most socially-oriented organizations. We own three buildings, and give four other organizations free access to them to work on their long-term projects: Tamarack Discovery School, Wright House of Fashion, MDCIowa, and Immigrant Welcome Network. We’ve also purchased the equipment for a food truck for other food service vendors who want to make our food culture more resilient. We also own 47 acres of land on the outskirts of Iowa City, and are working with urban planners, engineers, and the Iowa City government to figure out how we might plan a long-term bet on affordable housing, ecological sustainability, and designing for communal solidarity.
RSFIC was incorporated in 2021, so we don’t know how any of these long-term bets will play out, but we know our community needs to take some risks to find different ways to live. We’ve invested $5,000,000 of our own dollars so far, and hope we can demonstrate some sustainable and appealing large-scale examples so we can attract much, much more funding for resilience culture. Because after all : one way or the other, eventually, our entire economy will have to be sustainable!
The best way to get involved with this part of our program is to sign up for our newsletter here. You can also always feel free to ask RSFIC staff about this at one of our FANCE events!
Connect with us
Anti-social media platforms like Facebook weaken our relationships for their own profit, so we don’t use them. Instead, you can sign up for our email newsletter and we’ll update you with our progress. Or, feel free to just swing by and say hi in person – we’re at 1927 Keokuk St!
